36. Jason Yee on technical and developer advocacy

Speaker A: Welcome everyone to Decoding Leadership. My guest today is Jason Yee. I worked with Jason at Gremlin, um, that was about six years ago. And um, at that time I believe you were Director of Advocacy. Yes. And um, you've been in a lot of different roles, including um, you've been a software developer at um. I didn't realize you were at Open Sourcery. Um, I don't know if you were there at the same time as Alex Croman or not.

Speaker B: I was, yeah.

Speaker A: I didn't realize you had worked with him. Okay.

Speaker B: Alex basically ran the entire thing while I was there.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I worked very closely with Alex. He's probably one of my longest term, um, professional relationships. He managed me for many, many years and uh, learned so much from him. Ah, he's a very smart guy. Um, and then you were also at Mongodb, um, O'Reilly, um, and you spent a very long time, large part of your career at ah, Datadog, uh, which is where you're at today. Um, I guess a lot of why I asked you to be on the show today is I think a lot of uh, product and engineering leaders don't really understand technical advocacy very well. I thought you are probably one of the best people in the world to talk about this topic. I have a whole bunch of questions I want to ask you about it. Um, but maybe you can start off and just tell us a little bit about what developer advocates or technical advocates do and what does that job look like?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's an interesting role because it's something that means something a little bit different I think in every organization. Um, and for folks out there, you may hear it as advocacy, you may hear it as evangelism, developer relations. There's a lot of different titles and in some ways the, what you do is tied to some of those titles. And I think there's some backlash to some of those titles because of that. Um, but generally, uh, I have coined a thing which I don't talk about a whole lot, but um, I've coined a thing that I call the J shape. And if you think about the sales funnel, right, traditionally the funnel shape is you've got this big upper portion and that's sort of your outreach, where all your prospects are. And then eventually you get conversion. Um, and at the bottom of the funnel or this inverted pyramid, you've got people becoming customers. And so the J shape is something that I came up with that sort of corresponds to that. You've got evangelism, um, or sort of outreach, um, and prospecting. Like building a prospect audience at the top. Um, and that's something that advocates do a lot of. If you think of the traditional things of going out and speaking and making videos and social media and things like that. Um, and then sort of, if you imagine a capital J, you've got that crossbar, but then ultimately you've got this vertical line that turns into a hook. And so that kind of encompasses the other areas, right? That vertical line of bringing people from prospects to becoming customers. A lot of advocates work in things like enablement. Like, how do we enable, especially in developer tools or technical roles. How, how do you enable those developers to become familiar with the product, to use the product, whether they're prospects and they're just trying it out. Like, how do we set up demos that they can easily access and see the value of a product? Or after they convert, how do we enable them to use the product better? And then ultimately that hook part is sort of how do you throw those people back up to help you at the top? Um, and often that's things like volume, fostering communities, and so that could be leading meetups for your particular product or within that area, and ultimately developing champions, people that love your product so much that rather than having your own staff out there speaking at events or making videos, those people start talking about your product and advertising it, if you will, or promoting it, telling people how great it is.

Speaker A: Super interesting. Uh, how does that relate to marketing and like other. And sales and other kind of traditional functions? Like, I could see a lot of overlap. How does that typically play out and how does that work?

Speaker B: There's, there's a ton of overlap and, and this is why I think it's, you know, uh, we'll get to this and I think some other questions, but there's always the question of, like, do you need advocacy? Um, what does it look like? Uh, who does it, where does it sit in the org? And ultimately advocacy engages with all of those. There's not a single day in my job that I'm not talking with somebody from sales and somebody from marketing and somebody from engineering and product. Um, every day I'm talking with all of those groups. And there is some overlap. Uh, but largely, I think why advocacy exists independently is the background and the drivers, the KPIs that they're after. Ultimately what they're driving for is it's going to be a little bit different if it's a salesperson doing that or a marketing person doing that. And so having someone a bit more independent really helps define and build the relationship with your audience, with the developers or the technical people that you're trying to reach in a much different way.

Speaker A: I sometimes see sales and marketing organizations as very, um, numbers driven and very measured and actually very analytical and precise in a way that sometimes engineering and product isn't. How do you see developer advocacy? Where does it sit on that continuum? Or how do you evaluate yourselves?

Speaker B: Yeah, the KPIs for advocacy and developer relations are generally, for me, they've been super squishy, uh, and probably more aligned with, I would say, products and engineering, uh, than sales and marketing. Um, and that's mostly because traditionally I have preferred when advocacy is sat outside of marketing. Um, and that's because, again, for me, it's mostly about the authentic relationship and can I enable people, um, and again, ultimately turn them into champions. And so within marketing, when I've sat there and the drivers have been primarily around conversion, uh, that sort of has tainted it. Right? You start to focus less on building those champions because in a marketing world where you're trying to track leads and how people are coming in, you lose that connection once you make a champion. It's hard to say that, you know, Bob out there, he's speaking about our product and we're seeing a bunch of people come in because of Bob. But ultimately that tracks back because Jason helped make him a champion. Um, and so for me, it's less about that conversion and more about, like, can we measure how we're enabling people? Can we measure how, how much brand affinity, if you will, like, how much affinity do they have to us? Um, and it gets tricky, right? You know, there's. You can probably think of some metrics of, like, how often they interact with us. You know, when we have our champions program at Datadog, we do track, you know, are they writing blog posts? Are they speaking? Like, how engaged are they and how, how much out there are they on our behalf? Um, but, you know, ultimately, like, again, for me, it's more about the relationship and less pushing them to write that and more. How excited are they to do that? How much are they doing that on their own and can I enable that? Right. And so things that we've done internally are like, can we set up demo environments for them so they get full access to the platform, including things that are in beta that aren't publicly released, so they can try them out first, get excited about them, and then that excitement hopefully bubbles over and they're so excited, they write a blog post. They're like, hey, everybody, this is coming soon. Be on the lookout.

Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense to me because there's a way in which marketing, um, I mean, I have so much respect for marketers, um, but there is a part of that approach that is very kind of transactional almost. And it's kind of about. It is about conversions and numbers and these things. And building a community around your product, for example, maybe doesn't make sense for every product, but when you do want to do that, doing that, you don't want to do it in a transactional way.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Are there certain, um, companies where it makes more sense to have an advocacy function versus some m. That it just doesn't make any sense?

Speaker B: Yeah. I think in terms of should you have an advocacy function really comes down to who's your audience, um, and then what's your product and that particular area. And so as examples from my own career, um, at O'Reilly I was a community manager, um, so largely thinking of developer relations. More on, I would say that hook piece. Right. Of like, can we get people to be excited about the product? And at O'Reilly, the product was technical conferences, uh, so thinking of things like velocity for DevOps and web performance, um, OSCON for open source, um, Fluent for web web developers. And that was in terms of should they have it. Yes. We were the people out there that were getting people excited about these conferences and showing them the value of not only coming and learning things, but being able to network with your peers, being able to learn from each other, being able to share what, what you'd learn. Um, you know, and then thinking of similarly, when we were at Gremlin, uh, I was brought in primarily because Gremlin was less about the product in the way that, like, O'Reilly was about, like, conferences. It was more about the fact that Chaos engineering was still new and it wasn't a common practice. And so that one was more about like, who's the audience? Well, we've got a bunch of SREs and folks out there and just, uh, getting them to have an understanding of, like, this is a practice that you need to be doing. Um, you know, I would say on the flip side, companies where advocacy may not be valuable is if it's established, um, if there's an established area, um, and you've built a product that maybe you don't need developers so much. You know, you basically have end users and it's straightforward to use the product. You know, maybe you don't need that thinking, uh, of things like, you know, and I think Salesforce does have an advocacy sort of function. Um, but largely, you know, people use Salesforce, at least from an end user perspective. Um, and so I don't know that they necessarily need that. On the flip side, they do have a completely separate sort of team and that's for all of the people building integrations into Salesforce. Um, and that's definitely an area where you'd want, right? If you have a company and you're like, I'm trying to build up an ecosystem, I want all these other companies to interact with me, then having someone to focus on that would be valuable.

Speaker A: That's actually a really great example because it's the same company. But you show that, you know, there is a side of it where it actually does make a lot of sense and a side of it where it probably doesn't. Like nobody's going to like, identify as like, I am a Salesforce user. It's an important part of my identity. And um, you know, it's more of like a tool I use as a salesperson. Um, for people that are like writing applications on the Salesforce ecosystem, they may be very keen to attend a conference or learn techniques. And it's kind of in both of their self interest to provide it and to participate in it. So there's kind of a nice balance there. What kind of, uh, backgrounds do you see for people in advocacy roles? Like, what do you typically see?

Speaker B: Yeah, there's not really a stereotypical advocate. And you know, that's probably, that is maybe the stereotype is you get a lot of really diverse people, uh, and a lot of folks that have shifted careers. Um, and so often what I see is people who, you know, at some point they got into engineering. Right. But oftentimes that's, they were in another role. They realized that tech was a good place to be, um, and it sparked their interest in building things, or they were curious. And so at some point they went into an engineering role. But there was always the tension between, I want to be technical, I want to write code, I want to be a software engineer or some sort of engineer. And I've got this past, right? And that past might be teaching, it might be acting and performing. Uh, there's sort of all these other roles and they're like, how can I combine these together? Um, and so often that's what I see is people that are trying to find a good compromise between what we typically think of as your coder sitting behind the computer and some sort of other interest that's, you know, can I, can I work that in there? Um, so yeah, there's I would say there's no real single background other than, you know, I did point out that they became an engineer at some point and I think that that is important. Um, you know, and I've had conversations with other advocates about this and some people have, have said it's a little bit of gatekeeping. Right? Like, why can't somebody be brand new, like they were new in their career and like they want to be an advocate. And always for me the challenge is how do you build credibility? Um, there's, there is an argument to be made that a brand new person, uh, who's just out of a coding boot camp and so they have that beginner, those beginner eyes, right? And they can look at something fresh. If that is the audience for your product, maybe they are a good fit. But largely, I would say most the products out there are intended for companies that have established engineers. They're trying to solve a problem m in production at scale. Um, and in order to have somebody that's advocating for that, that actually understands the audience and can communicate with them, it's required that they have some sort of experience deploying code to production, running code in production, um, that they can fall back on and use that to empathize with people or use the lessons that they learned as an engineer to actually help people out.

Speaker A: How has advocacy evolved as a, uh, field? How is it different today than when you started and what changes have you seen in the field at large? And then maybe after that we can talk a little bit about what you've seen personally.

Speaker B: Yeah, in terms of changes, the number one thing is it's gotten much larger. I'd uh, say ten years ago, uh, there weren't that many advocates out there. It was a very, very small group. And in particular at that time, 10 years ago, the space that we've been in, at uh, least you and I, with, with thinking of things like infrastructure and observability and like DevOps, um, they're really like, we all knew each other. Uh, there was a joke that I had, I guess not really a joke, but a funny situation where I was talking with Mary, uh, Thangval, who is someone that's been around in the community for a long time. And we noted that there was a company that was looking for a director of advocacy, uh, and the job post had been up forever. And we were chatting about it partly because we're like, they're never going to fill this. We literally know the three people that qualify and all of them are happy in their current job. So they're not going to shift. Um, so they either need to change the requirements or have some massive comp, uh, to get one of those three people. Now it's gotten so much larger, um, as people have realized that this is a career, there's a lot of engineers out there that have, per what I was talking about earlier, are trying to figure out how do I meld the coding, the engineering part of my life, with the other passions and interests that I've had. Um, and so that sort of bled into a few other changes that we've seen. And that's largely that. When I started, social media was sort of a thing, but it wasn't. You know, you didn't have people dedicated to that. It was just where we all went. And you brain fart whatever's on your mind, you put it out there. And now there's definitely people that understand social media, understand the marketing of it. M. And so the role has opened up to people who are much better at things like making videos, much better at social media, um, and in a way, almost those influencers, if you will. Um, so that's been an interesting evolution, and I think it's taken the field to an entirely new level.

Speaker A: Of

Speaker B: the videos that I see, the education that I see, the engineering work that I see from a lot of advocates today are far beyond, uh, what I was able to do when I was starting and even what I'm able

Speaker A: to do today, I'm pretty, uh, far from this, but from my limited perspective, it looked to me like 10 years ago a large part of the role was giving conference talks. And I don't know if that's true, but if it is, has that kind of brand, like, I imagine it's really diversified from that, is that still a large component of the role for some advocates?

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. Ten years ago, when we were starting all of this, or when I was starting all of this, it was primarily conference talks. And so, um, notably in 2018, I was a nomad, and I didn't live anywhere. I packed up one large suitcase and I lived out of it. And I just went from conference to conference as the traveling circus, if you will. Uh, and conferences are still a thing. Um, there's still a lot of conferences out there, and engineers do love going to conferences. But I would say that it's gone from being probably 80% of the job in terms of public awareness, and again, that top crossbar of that J shape into being a lot more diverse. As mentioned, video is now a huge thing. Online training is now a big Thing, there are so many training platforms out there, and so there's a lot more to it. Um, and I think that that's been really helpful. As the field has evolved, it means that more people have gotten involved, but it also means that your audiences can learn in the ways that fit them best. Right? You can reach your audiences in so many more ways. And so it's helpful for both reaching them. It's helpful for. You know, when I was traveling, I mean, there were months that I had tens of thousands of dollars of expenses on my credit card, which, you know, if you, if I think about that and how much the company was paying to fly me around to all these events, that's massive. And now potentially, you could have somebody. If your audiences are primarily engaging with you on video or on training, online training, you could potentially have somebody that doesn't travel that much. Overall, I would say that like anything, if you're trying to reach a bunch of people, they're all going to have different ways that they engage, different ways that they learn. And so you do want to mix. I think conferences are still an important part of the role, but you do have to balance that with everything else.

Speaker A: So for you, you've also been a, um, technical advocate for a company that just totally exploded. Um, I'm curious how the role has changed as Datadog has grown larger and larger and whether you think that's more widely applicable or whether that's, um, unique to Datadog.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it is widely applicable. Um, when I started at Datadog, it was our third advocate that was hired, did a ton of public speaking, but also wrote some code. Um, and I've apologized profusely to the people that now have to maintain that. Um, we also covered docs and some technical writing. So we did a lot. And as the company's grown, as you can imagine, the team has grown as well. And so very quickly we split off Docs into its own team and got some really fantastic, uh, docs Writers, um, technical writing is its own team and we've got amazing technical writers. Training is its own team. Um, and so right now for us, advocacy is primarily focused on things like public speaking. So a lot of folks traveling to conferences and speaking, a lot of folks doing webinars, videos, uh, things like that. I have actually spun out into a sub team within Advocacy. And so I'm primarily focused on, again, thinking of that, Jhook, um, how do we get our customers out there speaking about the things that they're learning and the things that they're doing? Um, which has been really exciting for me. Initially, that was the goal was to travel less. I'm still traveling quite a bit. But it's primarily for our own events and to support our customers who are speaking at them.

Speaker A: In the past, you were doing a lot of speaking at events, and nowadays it sounds like you're kind of switching to setting up events where I guess, your customers are speaking.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a lot of speaker coaching, really. It's, uh, being behind the scenes. And the fulfilling part for me is that I think most engineers, even if they would say that they don't like public speaking and they don't want the spotlight, they like the recognition for the work that they're doing. And so largely what I'm doing is the coaching behind that of how can we take what you've done and give it the credit that it deserves? Right. And give it the spotlight and hopefully teach others based on the work that you've done. And so, yeah, super fulfilling for me of not being on stage as much and getting other people out there.

Speaker A: So a lot of what you're doing is kind of like helping other people share what their successes are. And that's that kind of tip of the J type of thing. What do you find is the aspect of storytelling that people need the most coaching with or that people don't come to easily?

Speaker B: I think there's a, uh, few, uh, aspects that most people find challenging with storytelling. And I would say that the first one that I see, especially with engineers, is not emphasizing the challenges and the struggles enough. I think people often see that as a deficiency. Right. Like, oh, I didn't know the answer. And so you get these stories that are really lacking because the story ends up being, we had a problem,

Speaker A: but

Speaker B: we fixed it, and everything's great, and here's the results. And so it doesn't have that tension and that buildup. And while the results are great, the audience is left saying, well, how did you get there? How can I have that same success? And so a lot of it is coaching the speakers and customers to really just lean into that, that you are a good engineer. And every engineer has struggles. And so if you've struggled with it as a good engineer, think of all the people that are actually struggling with it, and they are not going to come to the same conclusions and the same solutions that you came up with. So that's, I think, the first challenge, the second challenge is always where to start the story. Um, and so, again, oftentimes we want to skip those challenges. And so it's sort of with storytelling, not only where do you start the story, but how does that start that beginning? Engaging. Um, and so most often I find, at least within our realm again of infrastructure, DevOps, SREs in particular, where the challenges are, things are on fire, everything's broken. Um, and so naturally people want to start the story at the beginning. And I often tell people the best stories start in the middle. If you think about your favorite movie or TV shows or things like that, you often get this, what's called n media res of starting in the middle. And it's a classic storytelling framework, but you start and everything's on fire. The world is exploded. And so it immediately sets you of like, oh, what's going on? Like, my senses are just being assaulted by all the explosions and the action. And then you rewind to like, how did we get here? And so that's a nice framework for most stories and I think it applies to a lot of things, whether you're in marketing or business. If you're trying to sell people on a solution or even engineers as they're talking about like, you know, trying to sell a solution or propose like, you know, an rfc, it is that start with the things are on fire. Um, and that gets people's attention and it gets them into the point of action needs to be taken. And then you can rewind and explain how did we get here? And then ultimately close with the, like, here's how we're going to solve that, right? Here's why I want you on the journey with me, because we can solve this together.

Speaker A: And I wish I had, um, picked your brain about this earlier. I could have used this structure, uh, so many times. I've been a part of companies that have started doing company run events and as I've looked around, all the engineers are like, why are we doing this? I don't understand. And um, I guess I'd love to hear a little bit about what companies get out of them, what the people coming to them get out of them, and why it seems like every developer tooling company wants to have its own conference. Uh, can you explain that a little bit for people that haven't really thought about it very much?

Speaker B: I mean, why does every company want their own event? Is, uh, an interesting question. Uh, I would say that at Datadog we have Dash, which is our big customer conference, happens in New York this year. It's going to be June 9th and 10th. And how did that start? Is basically, I think the same as most companies. And that's that someone on the Board said we need to have a customer conference, go do it. And so we did it. Um, and I can see the reason why from a top uh, down perspective is that having your own conference and having hundreds of people or uh, even thousands of people show up says something about your company. Right? You've made it, you're established, you have some sort of following, there's interest. And so from a top down perspective it's obviously they want it because the investors love it, uh, throw more money at us, we've made it. I think the better answer for having one though really comes down to building that community. Uh, if you're starting again to think about that J hook is you want to build a space where your customers feel like they're part of something bigger, that they can contribute to something bigger, that they're woven into the fabric of your company in some way. And then similarly having your non customers, your prospects there, that's a good feeling, right? If they are thinking about your product like, wow, there are all these people that are connected, of course they want to become part of that. Um, so I think that that is the biggest value to me is getting people connected, making them feel like they're part of something and that inspires them to contribute back in whatever ways that they can. But also I think it provides them with a home, a ah, place that they can actually get value out of more than just feeling connected. Um, you know I started my career in open source before being paid as an advocate. I was involved in open source communities and that was my connection and it helped me with my career as an engineer. Right. Being able to learn, being able to get better and being able to build my personal brand as somebody within this community who knows what they're doing. And I think that's a value that companies often overlook. Is there is that community building of yes, we have a community of users. You're supported, you're part of something bigger. But there's also that value to those individuals as they can take that and leverage it to become notable in that community, to become someone of standing and hopefully use that to advance their careers. Uh, so I think that's a good value. Um, but yeah, ultimately, you know, when I think about the best events that have done this, you know, um, you know, for, for what we were doing with Chaos Conf, I think that was a great event. Right? Trying to build up a movement.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Um,

Speaker A: I'm sorry to interrupt but I still um, reference some talks that, that happened at the cascomf and also the connections out of it and the way it kind of like brought together a community of people that were doing similar practices and kind of, it was really amazing.

Speaker B: Yeah, Chaos Conf was great for that. The people being able to compare that other companies, other people are doing this practice, they're injecting failure. And so I'm not alone. I'm not the weird person that's trying to pitch to management that I want to take down production. And then as part of that, people being able to share tips. And then talking about that earlier, like having a community and exposing new people to that. Now you have all these people that are like, I heard about this Chaos Engineering thing. No way management's going to buy off on that. But now that I'm with a bunch of people, I can point to, like, hey, these big companies are doing it. Like, we should be like them. If they can do it, we can do it too. Um, and so I think, you know, Chaos Conf was a good conference for that. Thinking of other conferences like early Manatarama, um, very technical, but really inspiring. Right. I still remember talks from that, uh, you know, early Mozilla talk about how, you know, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people using Firefox at that time, Firefox, the web browser, and all of them sending telemetry back to Mozilla so that they could see how people are using the product, how they're browsing the web and improve it. Like, and just this thinking of the scale of that, um, and so it's super inspiring, not only for being in the community, but for engineers that are like, wow, that's how you build an observability system that scales. Um, yeah, lots of good conferences out there.

Speaker A: That's really awesome. Yeah. Um, I've had similar experiences. Uh, um, that was one thing I was going to ask you about, actually, is conferences, uh, that have really inspired you. So I'm glad you address that. Um, where do you see the advocacy field going right now? Like, what are the kind of things that you're expecting over the next couple of years?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, I think there's several ways that it's going to change. Obviously, I, uh, don't think you can have any content out these days without talking about AI. So. So let's talk about AI. That's definitely going to be. And it already has been a pretty big influence on things. Um, there's the obvious stuff of AI generated content. And for better or worse, that's out there. I think the folks who are using it well, it's allowing them to produce More content and better content that engages audiences and really helps them out. Um, like all things with AI, it's a tool, and if you use it well, it's gonna be a game changer. If you're using it poorly, it's just gonna be awful. Um, but I think beyond that, um, thinking back to that J shape and thinking content creation is just gonna be easier. And so the question for that is going to be, can you get the depth that people need? And I think that's where we still need people involved is AI is not going to give that to you. It will make it easier to create, but you'll need somebody with a connection to the audiences and communities you're trying to hit and who understands the depth and the direction of where to go. What do people actually need? How do we give that to them? So just picking up with that J shape, I think the changes that we'll see with that middle section in terms of enablement is right now a lot of companies are still focused on enablement, meaning we enable the customers to do things. We're making SDKs for them, we're making demo apps to help onboard them or educate them after they become a customer. And I think one of the overlooked pieces with advocacy is the advocacy for the customer. Um, and so per what we were talking about earlier, engaging with product teams and engineering teams, I think that the companies that are going to do this well in the future are the ones that are going to place a much higher emphasis on that advocacy. Can we understand what our users want through that advocacy function and actually feed that into the product and make it better? Um, and then thinking about that hook, the J hook and building champions, building communities, I think that's more necessary than ever, partly because with AI, with so much information out there, you don't need to do a lot of the, uh, that champion building, right? Like, it seems like it doesn't matter that much that you have people out there writing blog posts, because anybody can. They don't need that to learn. Uh, they can just ask AI. AI will read your docs, explain it to them. But I think it's becoming more necessary in terms of can you make champions that can connect and that can help you build those communities? Um, can you give real authentic stories? And so that's what I'm trying to do with our customers and getting them on stage. And that's something that while the information may be out there, they might ultimately be able to Google or ChatGPT the same solution that one of my customers on stage is Presenting, I think it misses that connection and that inspiration. Um, and so I think that that's going to become more important in the future.

Speaker A: Yeah. It occurs to me that the human aspect is so important and AI is just going to make that a little bit even more stark. And so, like seeing how people resolve things or, um, what sort of things they can do with your product, um, just is that much more relevant, especially if it's easier to do than it used to be. Uh, I've learned so much during this call. I really appreciate your time today and I'm so happy to be able to share it. I love it when people can understand each other's functions and kind of like the job that they do because so often we're very kind of siloed away and we don't really understand each other's jobs. Um, thank you for taking the time to explain it. Um, if anybody wants to get a hold of you, uh, um, or find you on the Internet, what's the best way for them to do that?

Speaker B: Yeah, I generally am less, um, available than I used to be when I was an advocate and I was out there all the time. So it was easy to find me at a conference or hit me up on social media. I still loosely am on LinkedIn. Um, so that's probably the best way. Um, on LinkedIn, I am. My handle there is get bisect. It's been my handle in most places. Um, or you can just search for my name. I'm the one with the dog emoji as a first name. Um, and that's mostly my spam filter. Um, it's pretty easy to see when a bot is reaching out to you when it thinks your, your first name is the dog emoji.

Speaker A: Um, that's brilliant. I need to do that. That's wonderful. Well, I've, I've really enjoyed this today and if I can ever be helpful to you, let me know. And, um, really thank you so much. This was lots of fun.

Speaker B: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Decoding Leadership. As always, I welcome your questions and feedback. And if you're looking for coaching or advisory help, you can contact me@rubik.com see you next time.